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US Navy Under Fire In Mass Software Piracy Lawsuit (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In 2011 and 2012, the U.S. Navy began using BS Contact Geo, a 3D virtual reality application developed by German company Bitmanagement. The Navy reportedly agreed to purchase licenses for use on 38 computers, but things began to escalate. While Bitmanagement was hopeful that it could sell additional licenses to the Navy, the software vendor soon discovered the U.S. Government had already installed it on 100,000 computers without extra compensation. In a Federal Claims Court complaint filed by Bitmanagement two years ago, that figure later increased to hundreds of thousands of computers. Because of the alleged infringement, Bitmanagement demanded damages totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. In the months that followed both parties conducted discovery and a few days ago the software company filed a motion for partial summary judgment, asking the court to rule that the U.S. Government is liable for copyright infringement. According to the software company, it's clear that the U.S. Government crossed a line. In its defense, the U.S. Government had argued that it bought concurrent-use licenses, which permitted the software to be installed across the Navy network. However, Bitmanagement argues that it is impossible as the reseller that sold the software was only authorized to sell PC licenses. In addition, the software company points out that the word "concurrent" doesn't appear in the contracts, nor was there any mention of mass installations. The full motion brings up a wide range of other arguments as well which, according to Bitmanagement, make it clear that the U.S. Government is liable for copyright infringement.
Hundreds of millions of dollars? Where will the DoD get that kind of money?
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As an American I hope this will teach the Us government to stop being douchebags about copywrite infringement. And about most everything else too.
Heh. I can remember, many moons ago, when Siebel sold very expensive licenses for MRI software on SGI hardware. They were quite miffed to discover that I had ported VNC to SGI IRIX, in order to allow clinicians to access the box remotely and use the software rather than buying each their own SGI Indigo box each with their own license. That was in.... dear lord, that was back in 2000. They were *miffed*, but I couldn't find anywhere in the licensing that forbade remote access.
Now, I would *not* want to permit that on Navy computers, because remote X sessions with the fairly poor non-"/bin/login" password handling of VNC is.... well it's dangerous, and can leave idle non-managed sessions lying around for crackers to abuse. But it can be really useful, especially for clients that don't have a built-in X server. And yes, X servers and clients have the names backwards.
The Army bankrupted this company due to rampant piracy of their software.
That's the origin of the US GOV'T RESTRICTED RIGTS in the (c) messages.
Delightfully missing in TFS is that a library, not linked to any executable software, was on a common desktop image. Not an executable, much less a runnable installation.
Piracy?
In the Navy?
That's a serious problem.
YAAAARRRRR!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In Soviet America, the Navy are the Pirates?
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Its probably just some lame program for training that got stuffed into the standard system image. Mission critical stuff probably only resides on individually validated systems.
I assume that is how they know the navy had 100,000 installs of their software.
During the lawsuit the Navy stated they believed they had a license that would allow them to include this software in their standard PC deployment image and that the only restrictions were how many copies were running or in use at the same time.
During the court case, the Navy admitted it has deployed that particular standard system image hundreds of thousands of times since the software inclusion.
Incorrect. They learned the scope of the problem through discovery and adjusted their claims to account for the much more massive copying (the original scope was just the single site where the trial happened). The DoD very much does not allow call home.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"We need to scope out this Bitmanagement deployment, Lieutenant. How many PCs will need it?"
"Several hundred thousand Sir".
"That's a lot of licenses, is there any way we can get by with fewer?"
"Well Sir, we could switch to a concurrent licensing model."
"How many would we need then?"
Scribble, scribble.
"I make it 38 Sir."
"That sounds better, we'll do that."
I'm curious, how do you get from "bought software for use on 38 machines" to installing it on 100,000 while "the number of active licenses doesn't exceed the ones it bought"
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